From Print to Screen: How Capitalism Adapts Our Culture

Chinaza Iwe BA History and World Philosophies 09/12/2024

Each year, dozens of lucky author’s have the option rights for their books sold and produced. They get to see the worlds they've built and characters they've created on screen, whether that be the big or small. I call these authors lucky, as they stand to gain significantly more than readers or, be loved fans of a franchise. The option rights(what Hollywood producers buy so they can adapt text to film) for a book, play, graphic novel, comic, and just about any print medium can be sold for anywhere from a couple hundred to a couple thousand pounds, and that's just what the author makes up front(there's a ridiculous amount of money to be made here). This obviously explains why authors keep optioning their books, and why Hollywood keeps picking them up -despite how incredibly risky they are. Adaptations always have been and always will be hit or miss-I mean massively hit or miss, think Bridgerton vs the Percy Jackson movies. 

No one really knows if an adaptation will be successful until it hits the screen, whether that be cinema or streaming. Most adaptations fail miserably with readers hating them, but they just keep being made. For profit. An on screen adaptation seems like the perfect money grab: a pre-written story, an established fanbase and half the workload. Yet, more often than not they're not that great, take: It Ends With Us (2024), Umbrella Academy season 4 (2024) and A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder (2024), for example(and that's just to name a few.) 

What is success when we’re talking film? I've mentioned the dislike for It Ends With Us(2024) which was adapted from Colleen Hoover’s book by the same name, but in reality it grossed 349.5 million dollars worldwide, despite that viewers, mainly readers had dozens of complaints. For those of you that don’t know It Ends With Us, it tells the story of a domestic abuse survivor, Lily Bloom, and in all honesty romanticises domestic abuse in a way that was hard to read- let alone watch. Most reviews give it an incredibly average rating of three out of five stars. Half of them saying the film fell short,in providing the comfort it was supposed to and the other half complaining that Blake Lively was a poor casting choice for Lily Bloom, the story’s main character. If viewers hated a movie but producers made hundreds of millions then is it a success story and for who?

So readers hate adaptations but still watch them and are disappointed almost every time, let’s talk why. Fundamentally, literature and film are different mediums. They don’t and can’t convey story in the same way. Print media can be as long or as short as an author deems necessary, but film and series are limited to their standard run times. Movies tend to be an hour and a half to two hours long ,and in this age of streaming and limited series at best we’ll get eight to ten 50 minute episodes and never see a second season. That's far shorter than it takes the average person to read an average length book. Beyond the obvious time constraints, authors and screenwriters or script writers have entirely different jobs. An author quite literally has to tell and not show whereas screenwriters do the opposite. Think how many Lord of the Rings  movies there are, the books are still longer and have far more content. It took three movies to tell us that story and we still didn't even get the whole thing. Of course, we can ask why we don't have more movie series or multiple season shows and we’ll just get the same monetary answer-It’s too expensive and too risky. We’ve already established most readers don't enjoy the adaptations we get even if they do make millions. Why would a producer out to make a quick buck and maybe a good movie take the risk of more bad reviews attached to their name? With literature and film being the lucrative and competitive industries they are, it's better for both industries if an on-screen adaptation isn't fully satisfying. What person would buy and spend hours reading a book when they can sit and watch it on screen? Or why would a reader watch a film if they know nothing has changed, why pay to see it when they can reread the book they already own? Both industries make an awful lot more if everyone is slightly dissatisfied.